Welcome to CaroBabbo.com, the home of Caro Babbo.
If you are landing on this page, it may be a good bet that this is your first time visiting CaroBabbo.com. Here is an overview of our sailing.
For 2024, I spent the month of May getting Caro Babbo ready to come back to Puget Sound for the first time in five years. We thought we’d take our time, arriving in Port Townsend at the end of October, sightseeing, and visiting friends as we travel. Instead, my close friend and editor, Peter Coleman, and his spouse, Maggie, decided to visit us at the beginning of September in time for the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Show. It was wonderful to spend time with them and the show was very good. I also made a number of new, kind of local friends.
We’ll keep Caro Babbo in Port Hudson this winter and sail the Sound, San Juans, and up into BC for the 2025 season. Port Hudson is owned by the city of Port Townsend and is only for transient moorage from May through the end of September. We’ll cruise from May to October 1, renting out our house using VRBO, and then rent a slip in Swantown from then on. (I actually think I’ll rent the slip permanently in May.) Our long-term plans are still unknown. Mexico?
We’ve also moved to Starlink, which meant we didn’t have constant internet and email, but we did have fast complete internet no matter where we were. A small tradeoff, but no more waiting for a satellite to pass overhead. (75 watts is too large a draw to leave on all the time.)
We had a number of adventures including a collapsed compression post.
Sailing in SouthEast Alaska has changed a lot since we were last there five years ago. Starlink is a large part of it, but so is the next generation of sailors coming up. They will never know about sailing for weeks and never sharing a mooring, but they won’t care.
For 2023, we were planning to bring Caro Babbo back to Southeast (as Southeast Alaska is called). We were thinking of leaving her in Sitka across the winter. John would’ve flown up to Homer in mid-May to replace the engine mounts among other things. Jennifer would’ve joined on approximately June 1, once we got a splash date. We were expecting guests. Maybe you’ll be one.
Instead, nature played her hand, and technology raised… technology won, for the most part. On May 3rd, I had an Ischemic stroke caused by an Afib heartbeat. I was flown, within minutes, to Harbor View Stroke Center where medication was given the reverse the clots, and a vacuum device was used to suck out the clots that had stuck. I have minimal damage. We pushed everything back a month. We cruised around the Kenai where there are doctors and medical planes, and left Caro Babbo in Homer for another year.
For 2022, Caro Babbo splashed on June 14th. This year, we planned to sail back to the Aleutians, traveling past Dutch Harbor. But, the weather did not agree, so we only got as far as Dutch. John flew to Homer on the 30th of May, Jennifer flew up a few days before splash. I didn’t post while in the yard. Although I worked full time, it seemed that I had little visible to show for it, though I accomplished something like forty tasks.
Caro Babbo came out of the water at Northern Enterprises on September 1st.
Here are some links to a few posts you may like from previous trips:
- We get a little too close to a glacier in Tracy Arm (Video)
- Music from Sidney BC (my favorite) and an Orca swims under Caro Babbo (Video), and Orcas eight years later.
- A three-part series on breaking down and the people we met trying to get back in running order – some of my best writing – and a follow-on two years later.
- Seeing Brown and Black Bears feeding on salmon in Anan Alaska (Video)
- Sometimes it is just right to write about specific people, there is also a category, people.
On July 28th, 2021, Caro Babbo splashed at Northern Enterprise boat yard in Homer Alaska at 5:30 in the morning. Jennifer, Flora, and I took a short five-week cruise in Prince William Sound. Unlike previous years, it was a very short trip – Life gets in the way sometimes. We sailed north of 60º North, a milestone for us. On September 6th, Caro Babbo was pulled at Northern Enterprises and stored for the winter.
I had been offered a crew spot on a replica 18th-century cargo ship sailing from Homer across to Russia. I eventually decided that it probably wasn’t the right ride for me, which was fine because the captain stopped responding to me.
Across the winter, Caro Babbo did well. Read about work done on Caro Babbo and the start of the 2021 adventure here.
On June 17th, 2020, Jennifer and John headed north to Alaska from Hawaii. We sailed from Hanalei Bay to the Salmaga Pass in the Aleutians. The crossing was 17 uneventful days, traveling as much as 166 nautical miles in a 24-hour day.
We’ve left Caro Babbo in Homer, AK across the winter and will return in spring 2021 to continue on. Plans to sail the South Pacific have been put on hold.
While we now qualify as bluewater sailors, we are junior members of the family. We realized early on that if we were in Hawaii, we must have sailed there, but as the Coronavirus closed Pacific nations, Ko Olina marina filled with vessels diverted mid-Pacific. These people were also bluewater sailors. When we arrived in the Aleutians the world shifted to real bluewater, high-latitude sailors arriving from Asia after moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific around the bottom of South America. We are awed.
The voyage starts here.
In 2019, we sailed from Seattle to San Diego and then across to Hawaii. In summer, 2020, we had originally planned to sail from Hawaii to the Kenai Peninsula before looping back to Seattle, and then decided French Polynesia was the place to go and then possibly spend hurricane season in New Zealand or Australia. Now, June 2020, we have pretty much settled on the Aleutians. Follow us via our tracking page on the link at the top of this page.
On August 19th 2019, we left Lake Union for Hilo Hawaii, arriving on October 25th at 3 pm, with a week in San Francisco, Morro Bay, the Channel Islands, and San Diego, before a 19-day hop to Hilo HI. We had been irregularly posting, and tried to catch up once Caro Babbo was on a dock in Ko’Olina, 20 miles west of Honolulu.
Our third and last inside-passage Alaska trip, before a planned a trip southward, began April 12th, 2018. We returned home on September 29, 2018.
2018 was just Jennifer and John. There were no major breakdowns and no parts were air freighted in. The highlight of the trip, Haida Gwaii: Sailing across Hecate Strait, was challenging and our time in Haida Gwaii was unforgettable.
Ketchikan and Juneau are towns we know and home to friends we’re happy to see again. We met sailing friends in unlikely places and in planned rendezvous.
We feel like we belong in Alaska and British Columbia. We have the confidence and competence of three trips. We have anchored and docked now hundreds of times.
Our second South East Alaska adventure started the 8th of May, 2017. We headed north again, with less speed and less breakdowns than the year before. We did not make it to Haida Gwaii. Hilary took more resources, physical and psychological than we expected, so it just wasn’t in the cards. We made new friends and saw a number of our friends from the previous year, which made the experience very much like returning home.
We returned home early because the burden became more than we were enjoying in 100 sq ft.
In the months before our trip, our blogging was about prepping for the trip. Preparation was expensive. We spent more than the initial cost of the boat between Jan 1 and April 15th for such things as a new suit of sails, a water maker, copper coating the hull, and five weeks in an expensive boat yard.
The new suit of sails from Jim Kitchen is great, as we hoped, changing the helm from lee to weather. We can’t say enough good about having a water maker, and the copper coat seemed to work as promised. We did not buy a wet suit and wish we had one onboard. We didn’t need it on this trip, but it would have been nice to have.
The trip thread starts here, scroll backward to read about our prep, forward to follow the trip.
Our first Alaska Adventure began on April 15th 2016. We ran and continue to run various blog streams including cruising, food preparation focusing on preservation, and sailing with Alzheimer’s.
On September 15th 2016, we completed our Alaska Adventure when we arrived at our home berth on Seattle’s Lake Union.
We’ll continue to post about that trip and other trips, people we’ve met, and finish incomplete posts. We’ll also post about Caro Babbo, our new sailing adventures, and the continuous maintenance any sailing vessel requires.
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Best,
j & j
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